TextPics – Creative SMS, Email, IM and PIN art for your BlackBerry

TextPics by Adorno is now available for BlackBerry smartphones and is a great way to liven up your messages beyond the standard symbols and smileys on your device. It uses ACSII characters to create pictures or art in an SMS/MMS, Email, IM, or PIN. If you're not familiar with ACSII art, its basically a text version of a picture and was widely used before pictures could be embedded or transmitted in messages. Back in college, my friends and I would send each other emails filled text versions of birthday cakes, cartoon characters, holidays and anything else that could be converted and love the fact that I can send them again with this app.

TextPics comes with a variety of categories (Animals, Bunnies, Celebration, Food, Halloween, Weapons, People, Romance, and Other) that includes over 150 images to be copied into a message. Users can wish a friend a Happy Birthday with a personalized cake, tell that special someone they love them with a rose, or send a scary skeleton for Halloween.

Using the app is as simple as scrolling through each of the categories, choosing the TextPic you want, pressing the trackball/trackpad or touch the screen to copy to the clipboard, and pasting into the desired application. The great thing is you can copy and paste the images into your AutoText or Word Substitution list to quickly access at any time. The only thing I did notice is that sometimes a symbol within a couple of the TextPics rendered as emoticons in PIN or SMS messages.

If you're worried about distortion when texting to devices that use other platforms, I had no issues when sending messages to my non-BlackBerry friends except for one whose phone placed the contact name on the first line of text. The one thing I hope will be included in the next update is the ability to send directly from within the application itself.

TextPics are a fun and entertaining way of sending art in your texts and email to everyone you know when you want to express yourself in an innovative way. TextPics is available at the CrackBerry app store for $3.99 for all devices running OS 4.6 and higher and is currently on sale for $0.99 (at the time this was written).